Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents of Volumes I, II, III
- List of contributors
- Editors' preface
- Kenneth J. Arrow
- Contents
- PART I SOCIAL CHOICE
- 1 Consequentialist social norms for public decisions
- 2 Information and invariance in normative choice
- 3 Utilitarian morality in a world of very half-hearted altruists
- 4 On the implementation of social choice rules in irrational societies
- 5 Walrasian social choice: some simple axiomatic approaches
- PART II DECISION MAKING IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR
- Author index
4 - On the implementation of social choice rules in irrational societies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents of Volumes I, II, III
- List of contributors
- Editors' preface
- Kenneth J. Arrow
- Contents
- PART I SOCIAL CHOICE
- 1 Consequentialist social norms for public decisions
- 2 Information and invariance in normative choice
- 3 Utilitarian morality in a world of very half-hearted altruists
- 4 On the implementation of social choice rules in irrational societies
- 5 Walrasian social choice: some simple axiomatic approaches
- PART II DECISION MAKING IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR
- Author index
Summary
Implementation for choice profiles and unordered preferences
The purpose of this essay is to show that certain concepts and results on Nash implementation of social choice rules due to Maskin and others are valid even when the underlying preferences are intransitive, cyclic, or incomplete. This fact is of interest when the society whose goals are to be implemented consists of groups whose choices are defined by voting procedures. It is easy to think of examples: the United Nations Security Council (or Assembly, or any other of its voting organs), a university council whose members represent individual departments, or an association of municipalities in a metropolitan area. In what follows, we use the terms organization and group synonymously. A group (say a university department) consists of individuals (department members); the society (say university council) consists of groups as its members.
When the body consisting of such groups is to choose among alternatives, we think of each group as corresponding to an individual (agent, player, voter) in the usual voting or economic models. But it is not always natural to interpret the attitudes of a group as defined by a preference relation. Rather, we may think of the attitude of the group as defined by its choice function, which specifies the subset to be chosen given the set of actually available alternatives. As an example, the group's choice function may be specified by majority votes between pairs of alternatives.
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- Information
- Essays in Honor of Kenneth J. Arrow , pp. 75 - 96Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986
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